Math and other things.

Wins shouldn’t be frustrating, but Texas 10, Houston 8 wasn’t the most satisfying of victories, given that all the key bullpen pieces were needed in a game led by seven runs more than halfway through, and that a game which develops early the way that one did should never have us holding our breath at the end.

Not the cleanest way to get to the handshake line or the Powerade dump.

What is clean, however, is the resulting 81-54 record that radiates in mathematical baseball beauty: Half a season’s worth of wins, a third of a season in losses (which happens to be half the number of stitches on the baseball). A ratio (1/2 to 1/3) that results in that perfect and elusive .600 winning clip.

Setting aside the incidental math in favor of something perhaps more noteworthy, consider this: Texas, which has now beaten Houston 24 of 30 times since May 2015, is 12-2 against the Astros this year.

You don’t even need to reverse that 2016 number to ask what-if from a Houston perspective — if the Astros, a very good team, had merely managed to split these first 14 match-ups with the Rangers, they would be 76-58.

And Texas would be 76-59.

Correct: If the Astros, battling now to pass two teams in order to claim a Wild Card spot, had simply beaten Texas half the time so far this season, they’d be leading the West.

A year ago today, the Rangers trailed Houston in the division and had just moved into Wild Card position. And we know what happened.

This morning, the Astros aren’t in as good a spot as Texas was last year at this time, but they’re just two games out in the Wild Card race, and minutes after his club had battled back from 10-3 (with their best 2016 starter on the mound) to put the go-ahead run at the plate against their division and geographical rivals (who had their temporary number five starter going), the team they inexplicably can’t seem to beat, only to fall short in a game they’d turned from a laugher to a nail-biter, Houston GM Jeff Luhnow retweeted this:

I suppose Jon Daniels could have recirculated a tweet last night that his organization’s Dominican Summer League team has emerged from 42 DSL clubs to reach that league’s title game (to be played tomorrow) — the fourth straight year the Rangers will play for the DSL championship — but I’m pretty sure you’ll never see JD do that while his big league players are fighting in September to play in October.

Especially if they’d just lost an intense ballgame to their chief rivals. The ones they can almost never figure out a way to beat.

It made me think about Colby Rasmus’s comments a month ago after Luhnow essentially told the media (and, by extension, his own clubhouse) that, unlike the Rangers, who had just acquired Jonathan Lucroy and Carlos Beltran and Jeremy Jeffress, he wasn’t interested in taking three top minor league prospects to make his big league team better — at a time when Houston was just 5.5 games back in the division.

Said Rasmus then to the media (and, by extension, his own GM): “That shows that [the Rangers] are wanting to go out and better their team. They’ve already beaten us with what they had. I don’t doubt . . . that we can beat them on a given day. But that does show something, that they’re going out and doing that.”

Luhnow redistributes a tweet celebrating his High A farm club, while the team he’s primarily responsible for (and responsible to) is still washing off a grueling, critical two-run loss.

Wonder how former JetHawks Jose Altuve, Carlos Correa, George Springer, and Dallas Keuchel feel about that.

I’m fairly sure I know how Rasmus, who is going to be playing for a different organization in 2017, feels about it.

And I bet I know what Carlos Gomez, who singled and doubled and walked and scored three runs in a game decided by two runs, thinks about his own change in fortune.

I’m a big Altuve fan and a big Correa fan and a big Springer fan, but those guys would be better off having some veteran leaders around, guys who have been through the wars (here, as opposed to Cuba), and not being expected to fill that role themselves.

Gomez, too, for that matter.

Trading for the controllable Lucroy or for Beltran would have made a whole lot of sense for the Astros. Might have changed last night’s result, and possibly a good bit more (even if the farm system rankings took a hit).

But instead, it seems their GM is looking down the road to a time when Altuve and Correa and Springer, if all three are still around, will be those veteran leaders, setting the tone for Alex Bregman and A.J. Reed and whoever had drugstore champagne poured over their heads last night following Lancaster 4, Inland Empire 1.

The Astros are a lot better — right now — than their front office apparently believes.

You can look under the surface of the Rangers’ aesthetically pleasing 81-54 mark and suggest that, in some respects, they’ve been a little lucky this year.

I might look at the Astros and, in diagnosing where that club sits today and why, point at a few things under the surface as well.